The coincidence of the short-lived genre of Roman love elegy with an unprecedented expansion of the Roman Empire under Augustus is the rationale for Sarah Lindheim's book, which is a valuable contribution to the growing bibliography of the ‘spatial turn’. To put it in a nutshell, L. explores the effect on the stability of the first-person subject of love elegy of an empire that is both expanding sine fine and prompting in response cartographic representations of a fixed Roman space. The ever-expanding fines of empire precipitate unease and disruption in the metropolitan subject and this produces various compensatory strategies. A Lacanian-derived account of the splitting, fragmentation and destabilising of the metropolitan subject's Imaginary under the influence of the shifting différance of the Symbolic provides L.'s theoretical underpinning.

L. includes Catullus as a proto-elegist, and a chapter on Catullus is followed by chapters on Propertius, Tibullus, Propertius again (Book 4) and Ovid (Medicamina, Ars Amatoria Book 3 and the exile poetry). L. shows what can happen to these poetic oeuvres when we foreground all those references to foreign places and products which are usually relegated to short explanatory notes, and the result is enlightening. She also draws our attention to some common words whose spatial meanings need to be taken seriously, finis and via most notably.

Of the four authors considered, Catullus and his addressees are more active participants in the Roman imperial project than the other three. There is a neat reversal in the relative positions of lover and beloved between Catullus and Propertius: Lesbia is fixed while Catullus roams; by contrast, a fixed Propertius needs to nail Cynthia down to anchor his subjectivity: ‘Cynthia prima fuit, Cynthia finis erit’ (1.12.20), Propertius declares, and L. argues that we should give the spatial meaning of finis full value. The seesaw between Cynthia's roaming and Propertius’ attempts to enclose her is pursued through extended readings of 1.11–12 and 1.8a and b. In the case of Tibullus, it is the word via that is symptomatic: Tibullus simultaneously upholds ‘a via-free Golden Age fantasy while embracing a world of love and desire that is overrun by viae’ (97). An extraordinary use of viae to refer to a striped pattern on a Coan silk for Nemesis (2.3.54) expresses the word that has been unmentioned but implicit throughout the poem: for all his posturing, Tibullus cannot escape the expansionist project of empire. Another surprising usage to which L. gives full value is the reference of Propertius’ Arethusa to ‘worlds painted on a wooden panel’ (tabula […] pictos mundos, 4.3.37), on which Arethusa follows her soldier-husband's movements. L. speculates on what this panel might have been, and then pits the fixed boundaries of a cartographic representation of space against the dissolution of polarities manifest throughout the poem. A similar analysis is applied to the concern with moenia in the account of Rome's early history in Propertius 4.4.

One of the most interesting of L.'s discussions focuses on Ovid's approach to cosmetics in Ars Amatoria 3 and the Medicamina. Unlike the other elegists, Ovid, champion of cultus, does not complain that women spoil their natural beauty by covering it with exotic products imported from the empire and beyond. Far from taking a moralistic attitude to female beauty products, Ovid approves. However, this provides another example of the empire's destabilising effect on the metropolitan subject, which is emptied out by the centripetal force of these imports: scrape off the exotic enhancements and you are left, not with pure unadulterated beauty, as in Propertius and Tibullus, but with nothing: cultus is all, and its agents are foreign.

L.'s book belongs not only to the recent ‘spatial turn’, but to a more established application of a Lacanian, or Lacanistic, account of the subject split between the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the Real (the third does not feature in L.'s analysis). It provides a sometimes too handy tool, which can be brought to bear on any topic, with similar results. All texts and subjects turn out to be decentred, porous, fragmented, as indeed they are. L.'s chapter on Catullus, which draws appropriate attention to the welter of foreign place-names and products in his oeuvre, will be less surprising for its discovery of a porous, hybrid and fluid subject. Stabilising binaries of self and other in the elegists are found, not surprisingly, to be unsustainable. The interesting question is how the decentring, destabilising or splitting of the subject is precipitated by a particular aspect of the Symbolic and plays out in different ways with different authors. Lindheim is largely successful in showing that the interaction between imperial space and metropolitan subject is manifested in different ways in these four authors, and she shines a new light on some of the distinctive aspects of the familiar texts she examines.